This invention relates to an open roof car, in which a roof above a car room is removable, and more particularly, to a roof opening/closing apparatus for opening and closing the roof.
It is conceivable to let a roof atop a car room of a car be opened and closed to provide an open sense suited when it is fine. As typical open roof car, there are known a convertible car, which has a roof in a form of a foldable top and a car having a roof, which is partly a sun roof capable of being opened and closed.
In the case of a convertible car, however, such operation as covering the car top with a cover when opening the roof lest the appearance of the car should be spoiled by the folded top is required, and therefore it is rather cumbersome to open and close the roof. Further, in its closed state, the roof can not share the rigidity of the car body. For the durability of the car body, therefore, it is necessary to efficiently increase the rigidity of a lower portion of the car body, and this increases the weight of the car body. In the case of a sun roof, only a portion of the roof is opened, and sufficient sense of opening can not be obtained.
Accordingly, there have been proposed a removable roof car, in which a roof atop a car room can be mounted on and dismounted from a car body, as disclosed in, for instance, Japanese Patent Publication No. 46-14366. In this case, the roof, when opened, is removed from the car body and accommodated in a trunk room or the like.
Heretofore, in such removable roof car the roof is manually mounted and dismounted for closing and opening.
However, since the roof is large in size, the operation of opening or closing the roof by manually removing the roof and accommodating it or taking it out of an accommodation space and mounting it on the car body is very cumbersome and requires considerable time.
Even in such an open roof car, in which the whole roof is mounted and dismounted, it is desired that the roof can be automatically opened and closed and accommodated in the car body when opened as in a case of a motor-driven sun roof.
To realize this, it is conceivable to provide a movable roof which is made integral with rear pillars and rotatably support the lower ends of the rear pillars on the car body. With this arrangement, it is possible to let the roof and rear pillars be accommodated in a trunk room by rearwardly turning them, and thus the operation of opening and closing the roof can be readily automated.
In this case, however, the free end of the roof draws a semi-circular orbit having a large radius when the roof is opened and closed. This means that it is impossible to open and close the roof in a place with a low ceiling such as a garage.